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The Great Depression transformed families and launched political movements. In Pinched, author Don Peck tracks the decades-long impact of American downturns on culture, politics and psychology; and predicts how the most recent economic shock could alter the nation's psyche.

CNN's national security analyst Peter Bergen just returned from Pakistan, where he visited the town where Osama bin Laden was killed. He talks about the various conspiracy theories surrounding bin Laden's death — and how al-Qaida has changed in recent years.

Jay Bahadur wanted to know firsthand how modern pirates live and operate, so he traveled to Somalia. He spent weeks meeting with pirates and government officials. He tells their stories, debunks myths and examines the rise of piracy off the Somali coast in his new book, The Pirates of Somalia.

Peter Spiegelman worked on Wall Street for 20 years before becoming a writer. In his new novel, Thick as Thieves, he brings that Wall Street experience to stories of capers, heists and double crosses.

David Bowie might just be rock's most famous chameleon. He's been a folk singer, a soul singer, a rock star and a pop icon — and now he's the subject of a new biography.

Humans have been speaking thousands of years longer than they have been writing. Yet many assume the written word is superior to the way we speak. In What Language Is: And What It Isn't And What It Could Be, John McWhorter argues that most of our assumptions about language are wrong.

Author Miroslav Penkov's new book is a bittersweet, slightly magical history of his native Bulgaria, complete with cross thieves, tragic lovers and a young man who buys the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather.

Amy Waldman's new novel, The Submission, centers on an anonymous competition to pick the design for a Sept. 11 memorial at ground zero — and the furor that erupts when it's revealed that the winning designer is an American Muslim.

Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi argues that the best leaders — including Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. — might just be the ones with the weakest grip on sanity.

Read an excerpt from historian Bob Riesman's look at the great blues man's ever-evolving persona.